The Meaning of Headlines: 'pretty much' - science

Time magazine included an article in its Science section on June 26, 2015, with the headline: ‘Why You’re Pretty Much Unconscious All the Time.’ What does ‘pretty much’ mean?

The article is about the human brain. It refers to a paper published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in which psychology researchers at San Francisco State University studied consciousness. The researchers devised a ‘Passive Frame Theory’ which states that nearly all of a person’s thinking is conducted at the unconscious level, completely without the person’s knowledge. The decision-making part of the thinking process is passed to the conscious mind, which does the work. In other words, the real thinking process is only a small part of the process. The brain’s guiding principle in mediating between the conscious and unconscious is described as elemental, action-based, simple, and evolutionary-based (EASE). The researchers stated, ‘Consciousness is the middle-man and it doesn’t do as much work as you think.’ The article continues to give examples. The researchers revealed that ‘It’s pretty much nothing at all’ and that ‘the answers have often been pretty compelling.’

The article uses ‘pretty much’ and ‘pretty compelling’ but not to describe something beautiful, like ‘pretty flowers’ where the word ‘pretty’ is an adjective. So what does ‘pretty much’ mean?

Oxford Dictionaries defines the phrase ‘pretty much’ as ‘very nearly.’ Hence, if something is ‘pretty much finished’ it is very nearly finished, or nearly finished. So ‘pretty much’ does not mean ‘much more beautiful’ – instead, it means ‘very nearly’ or ‘approximately’ or ‘not quite 100%.’ If something is ‘pretty compelling’ it means it is almost compelling, but not quite. Pretty much a done deal means that the deal is not done yet, but almost (it’s usually a certainty that the deal will be done, but it is not actually done).

Therefore the headline, ‘Why You’re Pretty Much Unconscious All the Time’ means ‘why you’re almost unconscious all the time’ – unconscious most of the time and conscious some of the time.

Scorecard for the Time headline is 70% because I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the Passive Frame Theory. So for me, the headline is pretty much compelling, but not totally.